Konferens: "Att störa homogenitet" - följ globalistagendan från första parkett

We are experiencing the emergence of what can be described as Post-Modern Authoritarianism (PMA). This description refers both to an empirically observable condition - the way in which the institutions of modernist parliamentary democracy are being hollowed out through the transfer of powers to a range of un*accountable agencies - and to the ideological device for advancing this silent revolution.

European political integration is a major component of this process, but PMA goes considerably beyond it ...

In contrast to earlier and more openly anti-democratic currents, the Post-Modern Authoritarians (PMAs) adopt a subtle 'passive-aggressive' strategy based upon undermining the foundations of the nation state - the only viable mechanism by which the ruling elite is held to account - whilst simul*taneously denying the reality of the system they are building. The act of illusion the PMAs are seeking to pull off is to leave the physical structures of modernist democracy still standing while divesting them of actual decision making meaning.

Post-modernism is the perfect underlying framework for a duplicitous political project that cannot afford to reveal its true nature. This is because it rejects the moder*nist idea that ideologies can and should be based on attempts to identify connecting truths that enable something fundamental about the totality of an issue to be said. Post-modernists contend, for reasons that will be given later, that the age of the 'grand narrative' is dead and that only stories about fragments of existence can be communicated. Thus, the PMAs, like a guerrilla hit-and-run army, try to avoid direct, large-scale confrontations.

Chris Tame has observed the fascistic way in which the new authoritarianism places great emphasis on the aesthetics of politics at the expense of honestly en*gaging with the political content of competing world-views. This leads, on the one hand, to attempts to associate the EU with pleasing cultural images and, on the other, to wage McCarthyite, black propaganda campaigns against opponents, associating them with negative attributes such as xenophobia and philistinism.

Organisationally speaking, PMA is also difficult to identify because it is not based upon a modern-era style mass visible movement. It draws together a wide network of political elites across the political spectrum.

The ideas that had gained momentum within the French left since the 1960s, based on the work of the likes of Lyotard, Derrida and Foucault and others, started to come into fashion in Britain in the 1980s as the previously socialist intelligentsia searched for an alternative theory. They needed an approach that could simultaneously lay the seeds of left recovery and maintain their own class position as intellectuals. Post-modernism fitted the bill because it provided a grandiose-sounding justification for ditching 'big picture', economistic socialism. Post-modernism contended that all truth claims about the world were the product of subjectively derived 'texts'. The Enlightenment belief that there could be a one-to-one correspondence between re*presentations of reality and reality itself, the basis of inductive science, was challenged.

... This approach chimed with the emerging feminist, environmentalist, gay and black groups that were gaining ascendancy within the Labour Party as the trades unions were losing influence. These new left tendencies argued that the way ahead was to abandon class- based politics and instead build a coalition that took into account their particular demands and experiences of oppression. It was in this era that the notion of 'group rights', later (and misleadingly re-branded as 'human rights') came to replace social democracy as the dominant left discourse.

... The other great attraction of the 'anything goes' post-modernist approach for the younger generation of emerging Labour politicians was that a party free of its ideological strait*jacket would be able to make whatever economic compromises were necessary to attract swing voters and big business. This was to have implications for Labour's Europe policy.

Now that pursuing a distinctively leftist programme was no longer an objective, Brussels ceased to be perceived as the threat it once was.

In the European sphere, the grand narrative the PMAs wish to destroy is that of the nation state. They seek to do this in a variety of different ways, including the assertion that independent nations lead to war (even genocide) and cannot cope with issues that transcend national borders. But, true to their passive-aggressive mindset, the PMAs refuse to articulate their own 'grand narrative', namely transnational governance.

The first necessary step is to do what the PMAs desperately want to prevent: the creation of a 'big picture'. We must attempt to show how the various streams through which politi*cal power is being drained away eventually meet up in a big, fast-flowing post-democratic river. The various connections have to be spelt out and the entire process labelled. Clarity is always the enemy of deliberate opaqueness. Resistance to old style totalitarianism was possible because the threat could be identified, understood.